‘Outsiders’ often blamed in protests
It’s been a common refrain from officials since civil rights era
After demonstrations for racial equality in Alabama were inflamed by the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, a black activist who was shot by a state trooper, state officials issued a resolution asking people to stay home, citing “continued agitation and demonstrations led and directed by outsiders.”
The resolution was signed by Gov. George Wallace 55 years ago, and the demonstrations it referred to included a series of marches from Selma to Montgomery, one of which ended March 7, 1965 — now known as Bloody Sunday — with state troopers attacking marchers with billy clubs and tear gas.
The wording of the resolution, which suggested that the demonstrations did not involve or were not supported by Alabama residents, was typical of the time.
“The notion — or rather fiction — of the ‘outside agitator’ was a persistent trope, especially during the early years of the civil rights movement,” said Thomas Holt, 77, a professor of African American history at the University of Chicago who helped organize demonstrations during the 1960s.
“Part of the motivations for the charge was to sustain the myth that the locals were satisfied with things as they were,” he said, “and if you could just crack down on the outsiders, the protests would cease. As the movement grew and spread, that myth became more difficult to sustain.”
But the concept of “outside agitators” in protests has persisted, in part because it is rooted in some truth: Then as now, activists and leaders traveled from city to city to help organize demonstrations or mutual aid programs. Freedom riders took buses across state lines to protest segregation.
Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., who was from Atlanta, traveled frequently and was regularly labeled an outsider by local officials.
Charlene Carruthers, 34, an organizer and the author of “Unapologetic: A Black, Queer and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements,” has worked with demonstrators in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore; Chicago; and Charlotte, North Carolina.
She has heard officials evoke the threat of outsider influence multiple times over her 15 years in activism.
But she said it has not deterred demonstrators across the country, including first-time protesters and people from different backgrounds, from “rising up in grief and anger” over police killings of black people.
Last month, George Floyd, a black man from Minneapolis, died after a white police officer pressed a knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes. That officer and three others were fired and now face charges.
In many cities, the ensui ng peaceful demonstrations against police brutality have sometimes coincided with looting and property damage, typically after dark. Some demonstrators have voiced concerns about protesters — as well as possible infiltrators — who destroy property or distract from peaceful gatherings.
These modern demonstrations differ from past movements because they are more geographically, racially and ideologically diverse, said Robin D.G. Kelley, a historian of social movements at UCLA, adding that some internal discord is unavoidable.
“There’s hardly a movement in the last 50 years that hasn’t had some tension or antagonism between those whose tactics are perceived as being destructive or aggressive, and those whose tactics are seen as disobedient but peaceful,” Kelley said.
Recently, misinformation and conspiracy theories about the protests have flourished online.
President Donald Trump has tweeted about the influence of “the Radical Left, looters and thugs” and threatened to use the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy active-duty troops against protesters.
And while there is some evidence that fringe groups have tried to discredit the movement, there is little evidence behind the suggestions from some federal officials that members of antifa — a contraction of the term “anti-fascist” that is associated with a diffuse movement of protesters who sometimes engage in techniques such as vandalism — are driving the looting and violence.
In this confusing landscape, it is worth remembering how officials have used rhetoric about infiltration to justify forceful responses to popular movements, Holt said.
“There can be little doubt that the Trump administration is using the ‘outsider’ ploy much as segregationists did in the 1960s, to justify extreme measures against all of the protesters under that guise,” he said. “As then, tear gas and rubber bullets don’t distinguish between natives and visitors.”
During the civil rights movement, the term “outside agitator” often implied links to communism, which officials used as a boogeyman to distract from demonstrators’ demands for basic human rights.
There were some black communists in the South, as there had been for decades before the civil rights movement, said Kelley of UCLA.
He added that claims of outside agitation stemmed in part from the racist notion that insurrectionary ideas had to come from somewhere else because black people in the South could not come up with them on their own.
Several officials — including segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County in Alabama — labeled King an outsider, a charge he addressed in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in 1963.
“Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea,” King wrote. “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”
In 2014, officials warned of outside influence when people protested the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson.
In 2015, when demonstrators gathered in Baltimore after Freddie Gray died in police custody, police described “pockets of people from out of town causing disturbances.”
And shortly after protests erupted in Minnesota last month, officials claimed that the people arrested were mostly from out of state — and then walked back those comments.
Carruthers said that claims of outsider influence have not drowned out the demands of demonstrators.
“People are calling for divestment and defunding of the police, and for investments in our communities,” she said.
“Yes, people from other cities and states come in,” Carruthers added. “And yes, we also see white supremacists or infiltrators trying to push our message off course. But overwhelmingly the people who are showing up are people who see what is happening in their communities and saying: This is not OK.”